Long Update

Please pardon me for not writing very often. Here's what you've missed:

Thursday night:
Ska music swap with my roommate. We traded almost 4 data cds worth of music. It was a good swap.

Friday:
I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had Shabbat dinner on campus with the rest of the international school. There's usually Israelis here, but they all went home because of the potential for a strike on Monday.

Saturday:
Not much during the day. I hung out and watched "Wet Hot American Summer" with some friends. It's a hilarious movie about Jew Camp. I highly recommend it. Saturday night my friends and I went to a pub to celebrate a birthday. It was a lot of fun. There was a band covering good rock songs and everyone was in a good mood.
Sunday:
My friend and I went to the Druze village of Daliyat al-Carmel. It's a short ride away from Haifa and is a neat place to visit. There's lots of touristy type shops where everything is "Druze work" and "made by my cousin". You always get a "special price" because "you're a good boy" and will "bring friends from the university" to visit the village. It was a good time. I finished my Chanukah shopping and so now I have gifts for people.
Monday:
The Israeli students went on strike in support of the teachers. They closed down the campus and burned tires in the parking lot to keep people from getting in. Our classes are "unaffected", they're just being held in the dorm's social hall and synagogue. My class on Monday afternoon was canceled because the teacher couldn't make it to Haifa because his wife got injured or something, so my friends and I made some shakshuka for lunch and played backgammon in the afternoon. I got the review sheet for my Hebrew exam on Monday. The test had more vocabulary words and grammar subjects on it than our midterm did. After tutoring on Monday night, I spent almost 3 hours making flashcards for the test. Tutoring was alright. I've been teaching young kids the alphabet. I don't know if it's sinking in, but at least I'm doing something more than getting spanked at checkers.
Tuesday:
Went to Hebrew in the morning and started to stress more and more about my exam today. Have I mentioned my teacher is a b****? If not, my teacher is a b****. In the afternoon I had my Terrorism and Responses class. We watched the movie "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West". The footage in the movie is chilling, but the argument and the logic that it uses are inaccurate. The glaring argument of the movie is that radical Islamic terror is an offshoot of Nazism. It's an interesting idea and could probably be proven, but the movie's proof lies in Nazi propaganda being redrawn in Arabic and the similar structures between terrorist youth programs and the Hitler youth. I can't say that I buy the argument that radical Islam derives itself from Nazism, however the main thing that bugged me about the movie was that it essentially re hatches Cold War propaganda framing Islamic terrorists as being people who attack America because of its freedoms and liberties (both are ambiguous terms by the way). It did a very good job of framing the conflict of us vs. them and stopped short of overtly advocating suspicion towards Arabs and Muslims living in the West. The film also implores mainstream Muslims to essentially apologize for the acts of the radicals and creates this expectation that mainstream Muslims are obligated to speak out. It recognizes that many are too scared to do so because it's very dangerous to do so, but nevertheless the attitude is there.

Honestly, I am very disappointed about this course. If you were to ask me what I know about non-Palestinian terrorist groups, I wouldn't be able to tell you much. And if you asked me what I could tell you about how governments dealt with those groups, I also wouldn't be able to tell you much. I understand that we are in the neighborhood, but that doesn't mean that there aren't examples and parallels that can be drawn from other groups. It's irresponsible of the professor to condense over 100 years of Irish and IRA history into 20 minutes, presented by students. The course is called Terrorism and Responses, not "A History of Palestinian Terrorism".

After class, I went back and ended Chanukah and my roommate and I made cous cous for dinner. Later on, we smoked some hookah and kicked it with out Israeli roommates. Then it was on to studying.
Today:
Hebrew test. If I get a C, I'll consider myself lucky. I spent 3 hours learning words and grammar last night and got up early this morning to keep studying. Most of the stuff on the review sheet wasn't even on the test. For some strange reason, our test was today, while the rest of the Hebrew classes have there tests tomorrow. One of the classes had there test postponed until they get a classroom. And they got to VOTE on the decision. I heard that my teacher gives tests on Wednesdays because she doesn't want to grade them on Shabbat. It's a legit concern, but she is done teaching, especially now, at 12pm on Thursdays. That leaves Thursday afternoon, Thursday night, and Friday morning to grade tests. That also leaves all day Sunday to grade them and even Monday. It's not like she reviews the tests once she gives them back. That woman makes absolutely no sense to me and has sucked all of the fun out of learning Hebrew.